


the wind beneath

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 1930s, Angst, Canon Compliant, M/M, WWII, Wingfic, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-07-23 15:43:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7469415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not everyone had wings - in fact, they were so rare that no one could decide if the winged were part bird, part angel, or merely some Darwinian fly in the ointment. Steve had grown up in the shadow of Bucky's wings, had always believed that having wings <em>meant</em> something. (Like Bucky, Steve's faith wouldn't survive the war.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the wind beneath

**Author's Note:**

> Slouph requested wingfic where Steve had scrawny little head wings until the serum, then had six wings like some form of angel that I have now forgotten. I wrote this, which hews to TFA movie canon except for the part where Steve and Bucky have wings. I didn't see slouph's artwork until after I wrote this, but all three pictures are excellent (see [here](http://slouph.tumblr.com/post/138701091596/wingau-steve-rogers-a-tiny-scrap-of-a-guy-with)).
> 
> There's rather a lot of reference to faith (Christianity in the context of a world where some people have wings), and a brief mention of self-harm.

Not everyone had wings. There was a scientific explanation for it, Stark swore, decades later and unable to tear his gaze from the brilliant white plumage stretched out behind Steve’s naked torso, dotted with blood where they had ripped free from his skin in the machine.

Before Stark and his science there was Sarah Rogers and her angels, the dull brown feather on the mantel that Joseph Rogers had left when he went to war. Angels were messengers of God, she told Steve, brushing his bangs back where they had gotten tangled with the frail wing just over his ear, the few feathers a jaundiced yellow that didn’t blend in with his hair at all. Different sorts of wings just meant they had a different sort of message to carry, that was all.

 

Of course, Sarah Rogers’s faith didn’t keep Steve safe in the schoolyard, from the other children’s fists or the time Billy Callahan tried to rip off Steve’s wing, or the taunts where they called him “bird brain” and joked that his mother must have sinned something awful to have such a freak for a son.

Bucky always shrugged the slurs away, folded brown wings rising and falling as his shoulders shifted. Bucky had wings like a falcon, sweeping up into sharp points and flaring out to twice the boys’ size, a deep brown limned with gold.

His wings had come in the first day of school, just after he’d punched Billy Callahan in the chin. Stark muttered something about Darwin and drew Steve a chart that didn’t make any sense. Sarah Rogers had laughed, ruffled Bucky’s hair and called him Steve’s guardian angel.

“I guess your message must be more important than mine,” Steve had rasped, the winter they were both ten and the doctor thought Mrs. Rogers should call the priest for last rites, when Steve’s fragile headwings were completely bare, bones visible through the patchy skin.

“Sure it is,” Bucky had replied, kneeling next to Steve’s bed even though there was a perfectly good chair, because every good Catholic boy knew to kneel when he prayed. “My message is the  _ most  _ important,” he told Steve, whispering thickly into the steam and medicine of the bedroom air. “God sent me to make sure you  _don’t die_.” 

 

Steve’s wings were on his head, Bucky used to say, because it needed the extra protection. Bucky had laughed like a loon the time Steve got into a fight and broke his left wing, and his Ma insisted on putting it in a splint that stuck out from his head like a drunk toppling out of a bar. That was the summer they were seventeen, the temperature at a hundred degrees and their blood bubbling too hot through their veins.

“I look like an idiot,” Steve declared. He sprawled half out of the window on the fire escape, too hot to stay inside and too mortified to go downstairs.

“You look like a _cherub_ ,” Bucky replied, smirking. He ran his fingers over Steve’s other wing, the pad of his thumb just grazing the feathers, and Steve shivered, Bucky’s eyes darkening to an ocean-deep shade of blue, a raptor’s wings and a predator’s gaze.

Steve’s wings might have been paltry, a heavenly afterthought, but that whole summer he felt like he could fly.

 

There were only a few aeries in New York – not that many people could use them, even in the busiest city in the United States. Only a few people had wings at all, and wings on your heels were hardly enough to lift you into the air.

Flying was like swimming, it was nothing humans were born knowing how to do. Bucky was terrible at both: the wings made him unwieldy in the water, and there was no one they knew who could teach him how to take to the air. He could get a few feet off the ground without help – could soar for a whole city block, if Steve pedaled like mad and Bucky perched on the handlebars, like Steve’s own enormous kite – but Steve said that if Bucky had fallen to earth, God obviously never intended him to fly back up to heaven. (They both lost a few feathers when Bucky tackled him for that, but Steve had already shrugged out of his shirt and for some reason it was easy to distract Bucky with pallid skin and the knobby bones of Steve’s spine.)

 

Then the war came. The Army courted Bucky, but Bucky said he wasn’t the goddamn angel of death, and so they drafted him instead. Taught him to fly. Taught him to hunt. They taught him something that chilled his eyes from the warm water of a tidal pool to the frozen slush of a lingering winter snow, riddled with dirt and smashed into jagged shards.

If Erskine hadn’t taken him, Steve would have folded himself into Bucky’s rucksack, because whatever God had intended for him, it couldn’t be more important than saving Bucky from the things that made his face grey and his feathers molt off in clumps.

They taught Steve to fly five feet in the air with the motorcycle, but gave up after he botched the landing three times, unsure what to do with the wings at his ankles or the suddenly large wings over his ears. Instead of God’s messenger, he had become Senator Brandt’s – until Italy. Steve could glide well enough to get out of a plane, and if he spent a few terrifying seconds tumbling through the air, well, bullheadedness had kept him alive before.

Bucky’s wings were skeletal when Steve found him and smaller than they’d ever been, the surest sign that he hadn’t believed anyone would come. Steve spent hours curled over them after they got back to base, exhaled kisses onto the bald spots and whispered all the things too sentimental to say while Bucky traced the edges of Steve’s new feathers with something like awe.

There was no time for flying lessons during the war. (Or, as Phillips said, “What are you, an elite team of carrier pigeons? Go find me Schmidt!”) They figured out how to work around their wings, the same as they did in bed on nights they could commandeer a separate room, and occasionally Steve would rev the motorcycle and Bucky would hang onto Steve’s shoulders and soar. He never let go, anymore. Bucky’s wings were never really the same, no matter how many prayers Steve breathed into the mottled feathers, no matter how much faith he had that Bucky could still fly.

 

Six wings – not a cherub after all, Bucky had teased him, using one of his primary feathers to tickle Steve’s ribs – and not one of them made a damn difference on the side of that train, his central wings pinning him to the corrugated metal when Steve tried to fly into the ravine. Wings didn’t matter at all in the gusts of the Alps, in the air rushing past the train and spearing Steve like a butterfly under glass.

Bucky’s wings extended, beautiful patterns of tan and dark brown against the snow, terror etched into the frantic flapping and his echoing cries. The wings - God’s gifts, Steve’s mother had promised, His special mark - didn’t even slow his fall.

Gabe told the others that Steve had been hit with a piece of scrap metal in the fight. He didn’t say that he’d found their captain screaming in an abandoned train car, incoherent and gulping for air, twisted around with the knife in his hands. Gabe had hit him over the head with his rifle before Steve could saw all the way through, but the base of his left wing remained featherless and scarred.

 

“You can _fly_ , dammit!” Peggy shouted over the radio, the static covering her sobs.

Steve ignored her, kept his despicable wings folded close to his body, the feathers all washed a sickly grey. They could serve as his burying shroud, he thought, as he aimed the plane into the ice. Steve was finished being heaven’s messenger. (Steve was finished with God.)


End file.
